Jakartass Home thoughts from abroad. Alien thoughts from home.

Because our parents and teachers had “fought the war for the likes of us”, in the 50’s and 60s we were raised to be conformists. Many of our teachers had seen service in World War 2 and had subsequently learned how to teach in a one year course at one of the 55 emergency training collegs hastily established to meet the demand.

Naturally discipline was strict, almost military at times. In state-run schools, and also in private schools where at least part of the funding came from government, corporal punishment was not outlawed by Parliament until 1987.

The 1944 Education Act introduced the Tripartite System of secondary education which consisted of three different types of secondary school: grammar, secondary technical schools and secondary modern. It allowed for the creation of comprehensive schools which would combine these strands. As to who went where, the 11+ exam was introduced. The grammar schools were intended for children who would later be expected to go onto to tertiary education and gain a university degree before entering the workplace.

It was my misfortune to be the only boy from my primary school to go to a grammar school founded in 1652 with the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers, a guild granted a royal charter in 1444 by King Henry VI with the power to import, regulate and control the manufacture and sale of leather throughout London, as its Board of Trustees. I was lonely and ill-suited to the learning of Latin by rote, or mathematics come to think of it, and I was generally streamed in the lowest class each year. My reports always had the comment that I had ability “but could do better”.

Because I was extremely short-sighted, as my owl-like glasses proved, my sporting endeavours were confined to running the line for rugby matches, or going on cross-country runs. As the school playing field was in suburbia, this meant running through streets with little to view. Unfortunately, I was rather good at that and got picked to be one of the twelve in the school’s cross-country team against Shooter’s Hill Grammar. I made sure that I came in 23rd (not 24th and last) so that I wouldn’t be picked again!

I was not such a loner that I considered suicide, which poor Terry Stitson did by hanging himself from a clothes peg in the changing room. All the same, the only friends I had were similar misfits.

(If you really want to know which school this was, and still is although it is now co-educational, then you may like to know that noted jazz-rock musician Tony Reeves left two or three years before I did. A couple of other ‘Old Boys’, now deceased, were Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter and a member of the British Union of Fascists, and Edward Nelson, whose “moving portrait of his wife won the prize for the best portrait in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1947.”)

I eventually moved on to a three year course at a Teacher Training College. Because I was not under any compulsion to take part in sporting activities, I took to them with alacrity and represented the college in the following sports: football, field hockey, badminton, tennis, and stoolball. I even on occasion played cricket and seven-a-side rugby (without my glasses), generally because there was a desperation to make up the numbers.  .

Obviously, being given the freedom to grow into adulthood, to be individually responsible for one’s actions, was liberating.

School was inhibiting and I had few outlets for individual expression, so greatly admired the few who broke the mould. There was a school band among my contemporaries, Karl King and the Vendettas. Karl was not at our school, but the others were. Thanks to the power of the internet, you can see some memorabilia and hear their demo single here.

One outlet we did have was the fantasy world of comics with the Bash Street Kids and the Nigel Molesworth books written by Geoffrey Willans, with cartoon illustrations by Ronald Searle, which ridiculed skool rools and dissiplin and pompus teechers at St. Custard’s.

It is the death at the weekend of Ronald Searle, at the ripe age of 91, which has occasioned this post. Apart from Molesworth, as “as any fule kno”, Searle also created St. Trinian’s, a fictional girls’ boarding school that later became the subject of a popular series of comedy films which were regularly shown on our (b&w) TV. (Ignore the 2007 remake.)

Searle’s publisher, Simon Winder said, “He created an alternative to the conformity of Harold Macmillan’s Britain. He gave Britain in the 1950s particularly a sense of anarchy. He was extraordinarily sceptical about all forms of authority and there’s something just astonishingly anarchic about Molesworth and St Trinian’s.”

Ah, anarchy. I’m not sure I knew what the word meant then, but I’ve learnt my lessons well since.
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Check out Perpetua – a Ronald Searle tribute blog.
Follow Nigel Molesworth on Twitter (@reethen)